Tag Archives: dark fantasy

The December dawn violated the night sky, ploughing runnels of crimson and ochre in its wake, like a giant taloned hand gouging fresh wounds over old. Or maybe that was just how I was feeling at eight am on a Monday morning having kept myself awake with a mix of Red Bull and whisky for the second night in a row.

The reason for my devoted vigil was snarling and snapping at me in the dark depths of the living room and the only thing keeping me alive was the circle of protection I had cast as an afterthought, never dreaming I’d actually be in need of it. While that was a big bully for me, I had no idea how long it would hold or what to do when it broke.

But that was not my most pressing problem – there was another darker behemoth lurking underneath that disturbed me more. This creature defiling my house and every waking moment for two interminable days had in fact been stalking me between worlds since I could remember. So long in fact, I’d begun to forget about it, sheltered as I was by the strong wards that guarded my flat. But someone had broken those wards and if I survived, I intended to find out who that particular meddling bastard was and arrange their imminent, screaming demise.

The thing glared at me with red, slanted eyes, howling like a banshee until the ringing in my ears eclipsed the sight of the triple rows of its mismatched teeth.

The protective circle chose that moment to break. It was on me in one loping bound, malformed jaws snapping for the fresh meat of my throat.

But there are worse fates than being eaten alive and I was about to find out the hard way just what they were….

The client hadn’t told me much, except that something inhuman had taken up residence in the attic of her holiday home and was scaring the straights. I was only too happy to take the job, swapping the febrile demands of the Edinburgh festive season, for the still, frozen solitude of the country.

The car had been loaded with needful things: clothes, Scooby snacks, a crate of Laphroaig and, last and least, the tools of my trade – two of my best obsidian scrying glasses and a ouija board. You needed all the help you could get when you played down among the dead men.

If things did go tits up, I had a small handgun with a mix of silver and iron bullets. I’d rarely used it though, because although iron and silver slowed supernatural critters down, it hardly ever killed them. And if, by any chance, the beastie hadn’t wanted to kill you before you drilled a hole in it, you would definitely be number one on its bloody, drag-you-to-hell, screaming hit-list afterwards.

All of which meant you only really had your wits to rely on and mine didn’t stretch as far as they used to.

As I drove, the sun finally managed to prise itself clear of the horizon, revealing a clear, crisp winter’s day. A vicious frost last night had tarted up the landscape with a sheen of glimmering silver and the stubborn remnants of a creeping mist softened the stark lines of skeletal trees.

As I drove north over the Forth Road Bridge and into Fife, I switched on the radio, catching some horrendous boy band murdering an old song, aided and abetted by its elderly creator who had a penchant for violating his own work. Feeling a rant coming on, I turned the hellish cacophony off and stuck on a compilation. Placebo kicked off my one woman party with Every Me and Every You and by the time I got to Snapper’s Dumping You, I was singing along like a loon at the top of my voice, drumming my hands on the wheel.

A couple of hours later, hoarse and famished, I stopped off in Inverurie at the Manky Minx pub, devouring a massive lard-ridden fry up washed down with gallons of stewed tea. In the dim, dingy interior, a small collection of punters went about the serious, mostly silent, business of getting as pissed as possible before having to go back to whatever waited at home.

I resumed the journey on a seemingly endless, winding road that was supposed to take me to Midnight Falls. It coiled, like a serpent around the banks of a Loch with a surface as smooth and dark as one of my scrying glasses. There were always local stories about such bodies of water – drowned villages where church bells could be heard tolling on quiet nights when the moon was full. Or others about luckless victims, killed by the untender mercies of loved ones and laid to restless sleep within the glacial depths, only to return for a satisfyingly hideous and brutal showdown.

Jagged, snow covered peaks closed in as my car laboured through the narrow, tricksy mountain passes. The sky darkened and a driving sleet came out of nowhere, obscuring the windscreen in seconds. The wild beauty of these lonely places always appealed, but living here permanently had its own challenges. During the few wan, stillborn months of summer, this part of the country bowed before its insect conquerors and became a biting, buzzing, stinging hell. Alleviated by the deep freeze of winter, the only downside was that you got snowed in and had to eat your own kin to stay alive. Okay, maybe not, but a girl could dream, couldn’t she?

Heavy clouds besieged the sky and I was still in the middle of a vast nowhere. Sleet turned to heavy rain and my flat out wipers only made things worse, the world beyond now a blur of dark grey and sepia. The grunt and thrust of Snapper’s I’ll Stand By Your Man started up from my mobile on the passenger seat – probably the ball-breaking client, Lucille Harper-Hodge, checking where I was.

The road was now a one track affair, thankfully deserted. Keeping the headlights on full beam I spotted a tiny, partially obscured sign pointing to the right. On impulse, I stopped the car, got out into the howling storm and brushed the snow off the sign, finally making out the words, Midnight Falls. You’d think the inhabitants of the village didn’t want to be found – maybe this was going to turn out to be my kind of town after all. I swung the car to the right and travelled down what was little more than a dirt track, overhung with a tunnel of huge trees, spectral in a perpetual dusk of their own creation which leeched most of the remaining light from the day even though it was only just after lunch.

Once free of the trees it brightened a little as I drove up a steep hill, the gradient so extreme, the car was struggling even in seond gear. When I eventually reached the top, I discovered Midnight Falls laid out beneath me, like a dark canker on the coast, caught between the turbulent Irish Sea on one side and impenetrable mountains on the other. What manner of man or beast made their home in such an isolated, Godforsaken spot?

The thing clinging to the living-room ceiling winked at me and, wiggling its little backside, vented the contents of its bowels on the corpse in the half-open casket beneath. It giggled, a high girlish sound and scuttled to the corner of the room where it hung upside down, watching me and rubbing its six fingered hands over vestigial ears like a monstrous, mutated bat.

Not paying it any attention, I picked my way through the wrecked furniture, moved aside the teetering piles of clothes on the hitherto untouched fake leather sofa, and sat down. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes, the creature began to creep back towards the centre of the room and the dead body. Posing for a moment like a prize diver showing off a new move, it dropped down onto the open portion of the casket where it began to dry hump the stiff with more vigour than skill. While I certainly knew that feeling well enough, I also knew something the creature did not: that in life as in showbiz, timing was everything.

Beyond the window, night smothered the remaining light. Not a difficult task given this was the desiccated heart of winter with its perpetual dark only ever leavened by shades of grey.
I had already broken my own rule of not getting caught after sundown here in Gilmerton, a village only just within city limits that didn’t have any other boundaries which dared apply. Perhaps that was why, in true old fashioned pioneer spirit, the hardy soul that had survived here for the past two years only thought he had a poltergeist to deal with. I couldn’t wait to tell him that it was so much worse than something that just wanted to throw a few pots and pans around.

A phlegmy chuckle was muffled by whatever the thing was doing to the corpse, a woman of indeterminate age – although given the part of town I was in she could easily have been anything under thirty. Isa Simpson had been a big woman, someone the quacks would have classified as morbidly obese. The collapsed lower third of her face and missing lips indicated an absence of teeth and grey, straggling hair struggled to make it to her shoulders. Her distraught brother Alec Simpson had told me that the whole sorry business had begun last week when she’d died of a heart-attack. Furniture had been thrown including plates and cutlery, some of which had struck their two little nephews glancing blows and injured the dog. Worst of all, no one could get near the body to take it for burial due to the hail of missiles which had ensued when they’d tried.

A feral growling reminded me why I was here. Crossing the room, I took the scrying glass out of my pocket and, ignoring the humper, positioned the obsidian surface to reflect the corpse’s face. Scrying glasses, if you made them properly and had the eyes to see, showed not just the surface of things, but also any lurking behemoths awaiting the chance to break through.

And there it was: reflected in the polished glass was a fluttering of eyelids that should have been well beyond that type of tease. I edged forward to get a better look, making sure I didn’t touch the monstrous little bastard – time enough for that later. I moved the glass closer and the creature paused in its labours for a few seconds, before whipping round to goggle at me in exaggerated horror, its jaw dislocating itself and stretching all the way down to its bony knees, like a Looney Tunes cartoon. But there was nothing funny about that vast maw, flipped open to reveal countless layers of jagged, yellow teeth. The skin was black and lustrous like a seal, broken by protruding outcrops of malformed bone jutting out all over the head. It was as though it couldn’t decide what species of creature it had wanted to be and had tried out several, not liking any of them enough to evolve one way or the other. It stared at me out of the sewn up slits where its eyes should have been, tiny ticks of movement underneath, like pupae trying to hatch. The arms and legs were elongated with too many joints like a spider without any of its good points. I was sure of one thing: it was dead and it had stayed here for a very good reason.

Through the scrying-glass the news was dark indeed: a spectral face thrashed behind the dead flesh mask, mouth agape, like a negative of an old film with the sound turned down. A chunk of what had been the sideboard flew towards me and I ducked, missing a nasty concussion. We had been doing this dance for a good hour now and after my discovery with the scrying glass, I had to admit with a bitter, sinking heart, that we were going to be doing it a whole lot longer.
The creature laughed…..

It was drizzling that Tuesday, a sullen, persistent skin-soaker that matched the mood of the funeral taking place in Liberton Kirk’s municipal cemetery. Everything was going to plan until Aunt Bella gave an eldritch shriek and threw herself into her husband’s open grave, trying to prise the lid of the coffin open with bloodied nails. The rest of us gawped and looked on, struggling to come to grips with this one and only show of the closest thing to affection that we’d witnessed in their twenty-five year stretch together. You could have called it a loveless marriage on a good day, but so far they’d never had one of those and now it was too late.

She scrabbled at the coffin lid leaving bloody smears on the polished wood, blonde hair escaping from its chignon and sticking to her blotched, mascara-stained face. The too short, too tight skirt she’d been wearing had rucked up in the fall and a hint of bright red underwear was all too visible against the black suit and rich brown of the freshly dug earth: a wound in tender flesh.

Uncle Monty started to scramble down after her but paused when she began writhing around and clutching her stomach, mouth open as though about to vomit. I wondered for an irrational moment if we were going to be treated to an Alien type scene culminating in Bella bursting open on the grave of her barely beloved.

But as always truth was stranger than fiction.

Two unfeasibly attractive young guys I’d never seen before leapt down into the grave and manhandled the lucky widow back out. They managed to prop her up against a gravestone all the while talking to her in low soothing tones while she nodded and sobbed. Looked like the wake wasn’t going to be as dull as I’d thought.

My mother gave me that look, rolling her eyes and twisting her face as she usually did when confronted with such attention-seeking behaviour.

So engrossed were we in this little family drama, that at first the muffled roars of rage from the coffin went unnoticed.

But then there was a loud snapping sound and the lid of the box sprang open…

Although the place had been wiped clean of ghosts, there was one that had not been persuaded to go. One that was so much a part of the fabric of the house and the people who lived here, that it had refused to make that final journey along the Highway of the Dead.

Looking at me warily from the corner of the room, the ghost fiddled with its over-sized granny glasses, the pattern of the wall paper behind it showing clearly through the insubstantial body. The forehead just above the left eye had been stoved in and something fluid glistened inside. This was how it remembered the injury it had received, a vague recollection of an outrage perpetrated on a body it no longer possessed.

I held out my hand and it came.

A wave of loneliness crashed over me casting me adrift on a vast featureless sea under a leaden sky, moorings cut, compass broken. But now there was a lifeline because we had a connection, a conduit through which, with a little luck, the spirit would yield its secrets.

Grudging details came at first, like reluctant suitors on a first date. In life it had been called Anne, but what had rooted it here in death was buried deep down under the surface like a sleeping leviathan. My death sense began to whisper to it, threats and enticements in equal measure, prodding the monster to wake. The two shape-shifters in the room with me whined, afraid of something that would never be the quarry of mere tooth and claw. Death however had no need for such hot-blooded seductions.

Capitulation when it came was as sudden as it was complete. My death sense swarmed eagerly over and around the spirit in spun filaments of blue and silver light. The ghost gained more solidity and in the process the extent of the head-injury was more evident. Previous reluctance forgotten, it, she, now wanted to tell me everything and the trickle of information became a flood.

When the last the frenetic jumble of images slowed, I pieced them into a sequence that started with two boys, the younger with short fair hair, the other a loose limbed teenager. There was now a third child, a girl, all of them playing in a fast flowing stream swollen with recent rain. The rich scent of damp earth carried with it the tease of summer and the children’s laughter hung on the warmed air. A brief moment of suspension and then I was inside the girl, Anne, and into a running commentary: a loop run by this forlorn piece of ghostly consciousness for more years now than it had been alive.

Adam starts saying that Phineas fancied Jenny so we laugh and Phineas tells us we’re being stupid. That just makes it funnier though. Stupid is as stupid does, mum always says. It’s kind of cold in the shallows of the stream and maybe that’s why mum has told us not to play here, but my big brothers are here so it’ll be okay.

Phin lifts a big rock and shouts to us to come over and see what he’s found underneath. I think he’s playing a joke on us for laughing at him because he can be mean like that sometimes. But then Adam shouts to me to come see. I turn too quick and put my foot down hard on a stone that moves when I stand on it. I lose my balance and fall face down into the river bed, smacking my head hard and everything goes black. Then it’s weird because I’m above my body, looking at it face down in the water. There’s a growing pool of red around my head and I think it must be blood, but how could it be, there’s just so much of it? I watch the red bits spread in the water and shout at my brothers as they pull me onto the bank. They look so funny with their mouths flapping trying to pick me up and Phineas even blows air from his mouth into mine when they get me onto the bank. Yuck, why are boys so gross? I really hope Amanda Strathmartin didn’t see that because she’d blab to the whole school about how I was snogging my brother and then I’d have to go to a new school and it would all be just be stupid.

But then some men with stretchers come and take me away, well not me, just my body, but can’t be right, ‘cos I’m here, amn’t I? Anyway, I’d better stay by the river and wait for mum to come get me because I don’t know if I can move. It’s so cold out here and now I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting. Now it’s dark and I start to cry ‘cos mum’s not come for me. She must be really angry with me this time, because she’s never not come before. After a while though I get the hang of things and find that if I really try, I can move. It takes ages though and it’s quite hard to do, so as I head off in the direction of our house I have plenty time to grump about why they’ve just left me behind.

I finally make it back to the house in a total strop and all I want to do is find mum. But the door is open and the house is empty and that’s never happened before – not that I remember anyway. Where have they all gone?

Now it’s all changed and somehow I’m floating above my own body. I must be in hospital ‘cos people in white coats are shouting and putting metal things on my bare, naked chest with electricity coming out. Either that or I’m in the loony bin. Amanda Strathmartin would really love this. I think about this for so long I start to feel funny. I can see mum and dad just outside, dad being held back by more people in white coats. What does he think he’s doing? Maybe I’m dreaming or something, maybe that’s it and it’s all okay. I try to call to mum and dad, but either they can’t hear or my voice has packed up. Dad’s face is all red and mum looks like she’s been crying. I float near the ceiling and next thing, hear this man with a stupid pointy beard say: “She was dead on arrival, it’s no use. Simon, better get someone to tell the parents.”

They can’t mean me can they? What is dead anyway? How can I be dead if I can still think things and see and hear stuff? But everything changes again and now I’m back at the house and it really does look as though someone has died because dad has his black suit on and the boys have their hair brushed in daft side partings which makes me laugh because I know how much they hate that. Today, though they don’t seem to mind that much. Dad’s face is all screwed up and he smells of that stuff adults drink that makes them act all silly and embarrassing.

“What is it dad?” I say and touch him on the arm but he doesn’t hear me. I find mum in the kitchen crying and she won’t pay attention to me either. What’s wrong with everyone? Are they playing a joke to teach me a lesson about being in the stream? But the boys were doing it too, so how is that fair?

But then I have a thought which makes me think that maybe I have gone loop the loop, like Jackie MacLean’s mum when her husband ran off with the baby-sitter: they’re not ignoring me on purpose, I’m dead and this is my funeral. It must be because I don’t have a body and now I don’t have a mum, dad and two stinky brothers anymore. Did I do something wrong? I shouldn’t have played where mum told me not to, but I wasn’t bad enough for this, was I? Maybe if I say I’m sorry, it’ll come all right again. I’m a bit worried about mum and dad to be honest, hope they’re going to be okay because they look awful upset…

But that night something had made me opt for Salisbury Crags, Arthur Seat’s idiot offspring, alone but for the wind tangling my hair and the scent of damp earth. Something niggled at the back of my mind and then fled, giggling, before I could catch it.

I had reached the Radical Road, the pathway that curved around the Crags like an old scar carved out of reptilian skin. My way up to the top was lit by the mauve phosphorescence of corpse candles, behind and below me lay the rust coloured miasma of city lights, like old blood on a corpse long dead.

As I climbed, a breeze ruffled over my skin, carrying with it the scent of spring and the promise of another sullen east coast Edinburgh summer. My menagerie had gone on ahead and was even now sending back images of our prey: a biker gang, lured here by the siren song of strong drugs leavened with S and M action but who were destined for so much more before the night was out.

I stopped for a moment all the better to savour what I had been sent; the weight of the gang’s murderous past and present as plain to my little dark-adapted eyes as Jacob Marley’s chains, each link a misdeed that could not be undone, an outrage that could not be forgiven. The huge and bloated elementals that had attached themselves to each and every gang member were testimony to that.

Against the darkness, the dim glamour of their crimes signalled their presence to me and mine like a beacon. But tonight there was something else hunting in the Park of the Holy Rood, something infinitely worse than a dozen Hell’s Angels painting the city blood red.

Something worse, even, than me.

The corpse-candles were still buzzing around my head, intent on leading me to my death over the Crags and exposing my position to whatever was out there. The wind turned chill, reminding me that I still had my own monsters to find and revenge to wreak.

After all, as my old mother might have said if I’d ever met her: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

A morning mist hung low over frost slimed grass. Branches of trees pierced the grey gloom like the petrified carcasses of unnameable beasts.

This was the Meadows, slap bang in the middle of a city of half a million souls that now felt as distant as the stars: an island of live greenery in a desiccated urban wasteland. Or so it must have seemed to the horned creature that had padded this way earlier on taloned feet, the old presences stirred by its passage.

My quarry was near.

In the bad old days the Meadows had been submerged under a body of water that stretched from Hope Park Terrace to Brougham Street, contaminated by raw sewage and worse. When the water had been drained it took the human waste with it, but the spiritual effluent remained, keeping me in a job and the city in fear.

I almost walked into the vast trunk of an old elm and cursed my clumsiness aloud drawing the attention of another predator out on the prowl this fine Sunday morning. A low, throaty laugh, the caress of light breath on the back of my neck and I knew I had much more to worry about than the minor demon I’d been hunting.

The Ice Cream Man drove along Constitution Street, the strains of Greensleeves trailing a sweet discord in his wake. It was two in the morning and raining hard, but the Ice Cream Man had no need for lights and window-wipers. Truth to tell they disturbed his concentration and that was Bad For Business.

A muffled sob from the back of the van told him that they weren’t all dead yet. Never mind, they’d soon wish they were. The hunger was on him tonight, an appetite that was getting harder to satisfy. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure it was all worth it. In those darker moods that seemed to take him more and more these days, all he wanted was to burn the world down and him with it.

But not tonight, not yet.

A police squad car passed by, the occupants blind and deaf to the ice cream van’s siren song – unlike the unfortunates he’d caught and stacked in the back. It was too easy really and the boredom made him cruel. Take last night for instance…

He smiled to himself and began to whistle, the world beyond the windscreen a smeared blur of light and shadow. Another sob from the back but he was oblivious, lost in the downward spiral of his own thoughts.

But the instant she woke and came to the window, face a pale oval, smooth and perfect as an egg, he was roused from his reverie.

“Come on down Cathy,” he intoned through the loudspeaker. “I’ve got your favourite. Just pop some slippers on sweetheart. I’ve got a special surprise for you in the back. Best get it while it’s cold though.”

‘Okay,’ said Rufus, ‘this is what we know. Some time in the evening of 28th May this year, Robyn Farquhar aged ten, ran out of her parent’s flat in Forrest Road into the street. They thought she was tucked up in bed with a cold and didn’t know any different until they heard the sound of sirens outside. Robyn had been found by a passer-by in a state of unconsciousness. She was taken to the Edinburgh’s Sick Children’s Hospital where she remains in a coma rated, so I’m told, as a 4 on Glasgow Coma scale. This means she can open her eyes but there’s no one home.’
‘Rufus, please, this is a child we’re talking about,’ said Ruby.
I rolled my eyes and got another drink up.
‘Just trying to cut to the chase Rubes. There is some neurological activity, but not a great deal. She’s been in that state now for seven months and doctors are not hopeful because they don’t know what has caused the coma. Also not helping is the fact that it’s a deep one and it’s lasted for a long time.’
‘Her parents Pat and Gordon got in touch with me because they’ve been, well, hearing things in their flat and they think it’s haunted,’ said Ruby.
‘What sort of things?’ I asked.
“Started off as whispers, shit where it shouldn’t be, hey, that sounds like a good t-shirt slogan for an exorcist, don’t you think? Never mind, where was I? Oh yes, banging on walls, you know the usual,’ said Rufus. ‘But then it changed. Became more heavy-duty, nastier, if you get my drift.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not unless you spell it out for me. And as for the slogan, you stole that from me when we were at Michael and Vic’s.’
‘And what a laugh that turned out to be. Okay then, voices late at night dredging up old secrets from the past, like Gordon’s affair, which Pat didn’t know about. Pat’s obsession with an ex, that Gordon didn’t know about and it went downhill from there. Things got more physical so to speak: plates being thrown and not just by the unhappy couple you understand, furniture upended, food spoiling in the fridge despite being just bought. Just you know, your classic demonic manifestations.’
‘Which is why you’re involved,’ I said. ‘So, correct me if I’m wrong but we’ve gone from a child lapsing into a coma to possible demonic possession, not of the child, but of the flat where she lived? Is that even possible?’
‘It’s not common, but having consulted the grimoires, it is possible. As you’ll know from your boyfriend Lukastor, there are many types of demon. Some possess places rather than humans. They are like humanity in that they can evolve to fit the conditions. They’re essentially parasites, arguably also like humanity. Anyway, that was the theory we were working on until Ruby did her thing and tried to contact Robyn. Take it away Rubes.’
‘Gordon and Pat gave me some of Robyn’s things,’ she indicated the objects on the table, ‘and I thought I’d give it a go even though we knew Robyn wasn’t dead. You remember that’s how I found Steph or Sophie or whatever she called herself.’
‘Oh, I think I still have a vague memory,’ I said getting an unwelcome flashback to our little showdown on the Castle esplanade with a particularly vile serial killer and pulling myself back with no little effort.
Outside something thumped against the window, a dark shape disappearing into the swirling snow.
“Brandy for everyone?’ said Ruby, pouring it out before I could stop her. The light was fading and I didn’t want to be here any longer than I had to. The photos on Ruby’s Wall of Death were also starting to creep me out. Unlike Ruby, I lived in the present and had no need of the dark, cloying weight of the past and the wants and needs of others dragging me down into it.
‘But I still don’t get why the parents wanted you to find her. They know where she is – she’s lying unconscious in the Sick Kids. If they’ve now got a haunting or possession surely that’s a separate thing? Hell it could have been triggered by events. There’s a missing link here, the one between the child and the goings-on.’
‘Pat and Gordon believe that someone, something has taken Robyn’s soul and is holding it captive,’ said Ruby.
‘Based on?’
‘Based on the fact that there is no physical explanation that can be found for the coma. Robyn hasn’t suffered a stroke, heart-attack, nor does she have a head wound. The entity in their flat knows things about Pat and Gordon that only Robyn would know.’
‘It might just be a powerful demon. It doesn’t mean something’s got hold of Robyn’s spirit.’
‘You don’t understand Rose,’ said Ruby. ‘They don’t just think the entity has Robyn, they think it is Robyn, in part anyway.’
‘That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,’ I said. ‘How could it be Robyn, partly, wholly or any other way? And where does the captivity bit fit in?’
‘Well first off we don’t have all the answers and the ones we do beg more questions. I went to see Pat and Gordon last week and it was clear to me that they were, well, scared of Robyn, there’s no other way to put it. I don’t just mean now, but before the coma too. It turns out she’s psychic and, by their accounts, a very powerful one. She always knew things she wasn’t supposed to. Can’t be easy for the parents when dead members of the family and other random spirits are spilling secrets to their ten year old who then spills them at school until pretty soon there aren’t any left. Especially when as you know most people prefer to live in denial of that sort of thing. So some of the stuff the voices were saying wasn’t so dissimilar to what Robyn used to reveal. But there was a nastier edge to the goings on that weren’t typical of their child an intent you might say.’
‘While my heart really does bleed, there’s still not enough evidence to support what you’re saying,’ I told her.
‘I’m sorry Rose, I’m not explaining this very well. What I’m trying to say is that when I tried to contact Robyn, I was successful and she…spoke to me.’
I made a circling motion with my hand. Day was bleeding into night and the flat’s interior grew gloomier with every passing second.
‘She said that she was scared,’ Ruby continued, ‘that she didn’t know where she was, that she wanted to come home but couldn’t – and that she had a message for you. For you Rose,’ she looked at me with frightened eyes. ‘Why would she have a message for you?’
‘In the name of god woman,’ I said, hand over my eyes.
‘She said was to tell you that ‘The Ice Cream Man Cometh.’ Does that mean anything to you Rose? Rose?’

By the time I got to the Cowgate, one of the victims was already dead, his decapitated body slung into the waiting Transit van. His two male companions had been captured and pinned against the wall at the back of the Snake-Pit club. The taller of the two, a boy who didn’t look old enough to be out of school let alone out on the tiles, began to plead for his life.
The vampire holding him growled, trailing a taloned claw across the boy’s neck turning the flow of words into blood. The wound was not deep enough to kill, but it confirmed that these three monsters were out of control. On the bright side, it looked like the boy was going to get the chance to paint the town red after all.
All of the vampires were blond, female and bore a striking resemblance to Morgana their Queen, so my source had been correct in that respect at least. The erstwhile driver of the van had abandoned her post at the wheel and was, from the sound of cracking bones, worrying the corpse while the other two played with their food.
With a cursed blade in each hand I crept around to the open doors at the back of the vehicle, breath pluming in the arctic night air. I needn’t have bothered with stealth because the corpse-botherer was too busy pulling the entrails out of the belly like so many linked sausages, snarls of appetite muffled by the corpse’s head which it gripped in its teeth.
The coppery tang of blood was strong and the Deadlights, that sixth sense I’d been born with, gift and nightmare in equal parts was eager to be free. It invaded the memories and thoughts of dead and living alike without fear or favour, consuming a portion of whatever it touched. And, like the parasite that I was, that meant I did too.
It was for that very reason that the Deadlights were out of luck tonight because I didn’t fancy chowing down on vampire. That left only good, old-fashioned brute force.
“Oi,” I said as though talking to a bothersome dog who had been rooting in the bins.
There was a beat of silence before she turned towards me, blood-soaked blond hair black in the sodium lights, teeth buried in the tender flesh of the corpses cheek. She shook her head, the flesh gave way and the head dropped with a thunk onto the floor. She flew for me, teeth distended and snapping. I brought both daggers up as though making an offering and drove them deep into her heart. Stakes were for the movies and those foolish enough to set store by such things. Like all good arguments, all you needed was a point and enough wit to ram it home.
At least that was the theory…

Post navigation

Who am I?

Well that's a good question and on bad days I'm not sure I know the answer.

My name though is Rose Garnett and I hunt down among the dead men in Edinburgh's necropolis. These story fragments are jagged little pills from my own personal stash; free, gratis and for nothing. For those of a more delicate disposition, there's always the Dead Central Soundtrack to help the medicine go down.

And to the select few wise enough to know nothing is for free, these little peep holes will reveal what's really waiting on the other side. Who knows, if you're very unlucky it may even be me...